IWMW events have sought to provide an opportunity to evaluate new technologies which may help enrich events. This year we will be evaluating the potential of the Shhmooze app.

As described in a post on the UK Web Focus blog this app was tested last week at a UKOLN workshop on on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use & Impact”.

Shhmooze is an app available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch mobile devices developed by a company based in Belfast. The Shhmooze Web site describes how:

Research by Shhmooze shows that 75% of conference delegates find networking to be hard work or ‘a nightmare’!

That’s because it’s really hard to find the right person to talk to within a crowd of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. And, for many people, it’s even harder to strike a conversation out of nowhere with a complete stranger.

In our initial experiment we discovered one potentially valuable use for the application.  After receiving a post which stated:

Help! Four of us stuck downstairs – Jenni Lee building.

I realised that the app could be used as a communications channel between participants and event organisers for event-specific communications such as this. In this example the four people who couldn’t gain entrance to the building would not want to have published such information on a more open channel such as Twitter – and the event organisers would not want to divulge their mobile phone number to all participants.

Following the post about the evaluation about this app concern was raised that an Apple-specific app was not desirable for a tool which was meant to encourage networking at events. Mehdi, the co-founder of company which developed the Shhmooze app responded with the comment:

I see you and Christopher both want to see Shhmooze on more platforms. We completely agree with you – it’s always been our plan to support every platform. We’re releasing our Android app soon (it’s in the works already) and more platforms will follow.

I’ll leave the final comment to Dan Wiggle who responded to this discussion with support for use of this app:

I’d be keen to see Shhmooze at IWMW and think it would be a useful addition.
This will be my fourth IWMW and while I’ve managed to break into a few of the social circles now, it was tough going the first couple of times around. I rather like the idea of an app that could make that process easier and help me ‘find useful, interesting people’, however cheesy it might sound

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad feel free to install this app on your device.  The IWMW organisers will try and check posts on a regular basis so if you do find yourself locked out we should be able to respond promptly!

Also note that following the initial evaluation of the app we suggest that you upload a photograph of yourself if you would like to make it easier for others to meet you and that you provide a summary about yourself and your interests to help make it easier for people to spot others with similar interests.

Since the Institutional Web Management Workshop series was launched back in 1997 we have always ensured that the slides used by the plenary speakers were made publicly available – so you can still see the slides from IWMW 1997 and even see the profiles of the 90 participants  who attended that launch event which was included in the opening presentation on 16 July 1997.

The Popularity of Slides Used at IWMW Events

In the past we haven’t sought to make the slides available from the many parallel sessions which have been held over the 14 years the event has been held, primarily because of the time it would take in getting hold of any processing the slides.  However it is now possibly for the speakers themselves to upload their slides and make them available in a shared area.

We became aware of the potential interest in providing access to slides from the parallel sessions when we recently analysed the numbers of views of the slides hosted on Slideshare.  In addition to the popularity of the slides used by plenary speakers we also discovered that a number of slides used in parallel session were also very popular including Mind Mapping for Effective Content Management at IWMW 2008 by Gareth Saunders, St Andrews; Know Me Knowing YouTube at IWMW 2007 by Adrian Stevenson, then based at the University of Manchester; Create a better seach engine than Google at IWMW 2009 by Michael Nolan, Edge Hill University and WordPress: Beyond Blogging at IWMW 2010 by Joss Winn, University of Lincoln. These slides have been viewed by 18,617, 10,146, 3,054 and 1,691 times respectively. When you consider that the parallel sessions normally attract between 10 and 30 people, we can see that these resources do appear to be having a significant impact beyond their initial audience.

Lanyrd as a Hosting Service

According to TechCrunch the Lanyrd service was launched in August 2010. It was therefore not available for use at IWMW 2010 which was held in July 2010. However we quickly recognised the potential for this service for which it was suggested that it “could potentially be the Wikipedia of web conferences“. After IWMW 2010 was over we provided details of the plenary sessions on the IWMW 2010 Lanyrd page and also embedded the slides and accompanying videos on the service.

This year we would like to build on our initial approaches with the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd site. However rather than attempting to process all of the resources used at the event ourselves (which is not a scalable solution) we will invite the workshop facilitators to provide links to their slides rom the Lanyrd pages we have created (which can be embedded in the pages from slides hosted on Slideshare), possibly after the event has been held.

We feel that this will help to ensure that the ideas presented in the workshop sessions are made available to a much wider audience and can help to raise the visbility and profile of the facilitators.

Note that the event organisers (myself and Marieke) will also be facilitating two workshop sessions ourselves. In order to illustrate how the Lanyrd page can be used we have created entries for our sessions on The Web Management Community: Beyond IWMW and JISCMail Lists and The Economical Way to Amplify Your Event. We will add the links to the slides we will be using either after the event – or possibly before if we feel it may be useful for remote participants to access the slides whilst the workshop is being held.

What You Can Do

In order to facilitate sharing of your slides and make the slides easy to find we invite you to go to the http://www.slideshare.net/event/iwmw2011 Slideshare event group and join this group. When you upload your slides to Slideshare you should click on the More tab above the slide and select the IWMW 2011 group. Your slideshow should then be included with other presentations used at the IWMW 2011 event.

In addition if you visit the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd group you can add yourself at a speaker if you are not already listed – if you are a Twitter user you can use your Twitter ID but if not just give your name as a text string. You can then visit the page for your session and simply add then add any additional resources relevant to your session.

Note that you may, of course, not wish to upload your slides until after the event (we appreciate that the slides may be updated at the last minute or that you may not want participants to be able to view the slides in advance.

An example of the Lanyrd page for the “Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact” session at IWMW 2010 is shown below.

One area of technology which will be of interest to participants at the IWMW 2011 event will be HTML5 and the related Open Web Platform portfolio of W3C standards which can help to provide richer functionality with enhanced user interfaces.  A plenary talk on “HTML5 (and friends)” given by Patrick Lauke at IWMW 2010 helped to generate interest in HTML5′s potential for use to support institutional Web services in a range of areas. But in the year since then how has the sector gone about using HTML5, CSS, AJAX and related technologies?  Are we seeing significant benefits and if so, in which areas?  What approaches are being taken to deploying HTML5 – in-house development work, use of HTML5 from existing content management systems, application development environments, VLEs, etc.?

Request for Proposals For Case Studies

In order to find answers to these questions the JISC is funding case studies on use of HTML5 and related standards in areas of relevance to the higher/further education sector. UKOLN, which is managing this work, has announced a Request for Proposals (RfP) For HTML5 Case Studies and a summary is given below.

The proposals for HTML5 case studies and demonstrators should describe best practices and scenarios for making use of HTML5 and related Open Web Platform standards in areas of relevance to those working in the higher and further education sectors.

The proposals should address new features of the emerging HTML5 standard (e.g. canvas; geo-location; local storage; video; form fill; etc.) or related standards which form part of the W3C’s Open Web Platform such as the CSS, DOM, MathML, etc.

Application areas might include, but are not restricted to, benefits to institutional Web site (e.g. SEO benefits or enriched functionality); teaching and learning applications (course lectures delivered via video, audio, etc.; lab notebooks); research applications (e.g. articles, series, journals; books; table of contents; bibliography; citation); multi-channel access; etc.

The proposals should describe how the work was implemented and the ways in which the new functionality was (or could be) implemented in a real-world context of legacy browsers; possible lack of development tools; etc.

Case studies must be made available under a Creative Commons licence and if accompanying code is provided this should be made available under an appropriate Open Source licence.

A sum of £5,000 is available for each accepted submission. The deadline for submissions is Monday 18 July 2011. Accepted proposals must agree to provide final case studies by 16 September 2011.

• The event is a bargain at £200 (or £250 including accommodation): There are other great conferences for those working in the delivery of large-scale Web services but they are likely to cost significantly more:  such as this one-day event costing £225+VAT or this two-day conference which costs £595 (plus VAT and no accommodation).
• The programme is designed for those working in higher/further education: Many of the speakers and facilitators work in higher education or work for companies which specialise in supporting the sector.
• You can get “tens of thousands of pounds worth of free consultancy“!: Martin Hamilton, head of Internet Services at Loughborough University, described in a video interview how at the IWMW 2010 event he had “gotten tens of thousands of pounds worth of free consultancy” from the various discussions he had attended during his 3 days at the first IWMW event he had attended! On his blog he subsequently described how “The highlight of IWMW10 for me was that I became aware of an open source product that will save my institution around £50K over a three year timeframe. In my view this alone amply justifies the £350 conference registration fee.“
• You’ll hear about SEO strategies for a University context: In a keynote talk Professor Melius Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa will provide empirical research results from analysis of UK university Web sites which will indicate where improvements can be made to increase the visibility of UK HE Web sites to search engines.
• You’ll have an ideal opportunity to cultivate professional network: The growing importance of social networks to support professional activities is becoming more widely acknowledged. However, despite the potential benefits of services such as Twitter and LinkedIn, the value of face-to-face meetings provided by events such as IWMW should not be under-estimated.
• You’ll have an opportunity to engage and not just sit back and listen: In higher education we are well aware of the value of active learning. The IWMW has always provided opportunities for participants to actively engage in discussions , especially in the 90 minute workshop sessions.
• You can attend accompanying DevCSI workshop on Open Data and the Institutional Web: This free DevCSI workshop begins on the day before IWMW 2011 and will provide an opportunity for developers and those who wish to engage in or commission development work related to access to, use and reuse of institutional data to share ideas, hear case studies and engage in lightweight development activities.
• You can engage with marketing and techie communities: Some Web events tend to be very focussed on marketing perspectives whilst at other events techies may dominate and talk in a strange language of TLAs (and even XTLAs).  At IWMW 2011 Amber Thomas will give a plenary talk on “Marketing and Other Dirty Words” in which she will “bring together key messages from marketing, social media around content, usage tracking and strategy, with ideas for how we can present our intellectual assets online to get maximum effect”.
• You can hear a plenary talk about how an institution has gone about embedding Web 2.0: As described in a post on the IWMW 2011 blog Martin Hamilton will share the experiences gained at Loughborough University.
• You can also hear about and discuss legal issues and the Web: One of the 90 minute parallel workshop session will address Your Top Ten Legal Issues To Be Thinking About Now.  Since every University will this year have to be considering how to respond to the new cookie legislation, this will be of interest to many.

Can you afford not to attend?

If you’ve not attended an IWMW event previously attending this year’s event will provide an opportunity to meet your peers, explore shared issues and discuss ways in which Web managers can be approaching the new challenges which we face.  If, on the other hand, you have attended in previous years you will discover that although the event is returning to a 2-day format for the first time since 1997 we will continue to be providing a full programme of talks and workshop sessions as well as opportunities for you to interact with others working in similar roles within the sector.

BTW in case your confused by my portrait, if you zoom in you’ll find it is made up of images of the people I follow on Twitter.  It was created using the Frintr service. I’ve used the image to make the point that many of the ideas I have are based on the discussions I’ve had and the suggestions which have been shared by members of my professional network. Thank you!